Glacier hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and avalanches/landslides affect populations in mountain regions worldwide. And threats remain pressing as GLOFs and other glacier hazards are exacerbated with climate change and glacier shrinkage, as the most recent IPCC special report on oceans and the cryosphere demonstrates clearly.
Carey and his Glacier Lab have created an extensive Glaciers and Society Website for information and mountain glaciers and polar icebergs. The website and resources presented on the site have a particular focus on the societal dimensions that are less well covered compared to the technical and scientific aspects of GLOFs and glacier landslides.
Depiction of 1941 Huaraz GLOF that killed thousands.
Peruvians have experienced some of the world’s most deadly glacier disasters. This is the topic of Carey’s book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford, 2010); in Spanish/Español: Glaciares, cambio climático y desastres naturales: Ciencia y sociedad en el Perú, traducido por Jorge Bayona (Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2014). More than 10,000 people have died around the Cordillera Blanca alone from glacier avalanches and GLOFs since 1941. A recent destructive flood occurred in April 2010 from Mount Hualcán and Lake 513, which caused significant damage in the town of Carhuaz, as Carey’s article explains.
Unfortunately, dangerous conditions persist as Lake Palcacocha above the city of Huaraz grows steadily and as new lakes form, such as one near Lake Artesoncocha above the city of Caraz.
Carey has been studying these glacier hazards for over a decade, and increasingly works collaboratively with teams of researchers in South America, Europe, and North America, particularly with Christian Huggel and others at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Carey and Huggel, along with John Clague and Andreas Kääb, co-edited the book The High-Mountain Cryosphere: Environmental Changes and Human R
isks (Cambridge, 2015). Check out one of their newest collaborative papers here, on loss and damage in the mountain cryosphere.